When players get political, it turns out that fans can get political right back. After months of speculation and piles of anecdotal evidence, market-research company J. D. Power has weighed in with real data. After surveying 9,200 fans, researchers found that “national anthem protests were the top reason that NFL fans watched fewer games last season.” The protests were never popular. A September 2016 Reuters poll indicated that a super-majority of 72 percent of Americans believed the protests, led by Colin Kaepernick, were “unpatriotic,” but evidence that his protest had an impact on ratings was spotty, at best.

For the first time in my life I am looking more forward to hockey than football. I recommend it to anyone on here, check out hockey. Watch the post game interviews. Learn the sport. You will come to enjoy it. What hockey players do takes far more skill than any other sport.

President Trump’s approval rating is at 38 percent. His base is said to be eroding. Average approval of the Republican-controlled Congress is at 16 percent. And the president is at war with his party’s leaders. For Democrats, what’s not to like? The answer isn’t as obvious as it might sound. Trump and the Republicans have concluded one of the least productive first six months of a new presidency. No signature piece of legislation has reached the president’s desk, and the notable failure to enact a health-care bill stands as an indictment against both the president and GOP congressional leaders.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) -- Hundreds of people chanted, threw punches, hurled water bottles and unleashed chemical sprays on each other Saturday after violence erupted at a white nationalist rally in Virginia. At least one person was arrested. Gov. Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency, and police dressed in riot gear ordered people at the rally in Charlottesville to disperse after chaotic clashes between white nationalists and counter-protesters. Small bands of protesters who showed up to express their opposition to the rally were seen marching around the city peacefully by midafternoon, chanting and waving flags.

Some White House and Republican officials are exploring the idea of putting West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin in charge of the Energy Department, according to four people familiar with the discussions, a move that could boost President Donald Trump’s stalled legislative agenda. If Manchin were offered and accepted the position, that would allow West Virginia’s Governor Jim Justice -- a newly minted Republican -- to appoint a GOP successor and bring the party a vote closer in the Senate to being able to repeal Obamacare. The idea is in the early stages of consideration, and it’s unclear whether it has

Late last month, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats called North Korea’s nuclear weapons program a “potential existential threat to the United States.” Coats hedges a bit by throwing in the modifier “potentially,” but he has spoken this way before. Unless he has spectacular secret information, this is woefully inaccurate. North Korea is a growing threat to the United States with its nuclear missile program, and it is indeed an existential threat to South Korea and Japan. But the threat Pyongyang poses to the United States is not actually existential as, for example, Russian and Chinese nuclear arsenals

"Pundits should have fixed terms,” left-wing author Naomi Klein recently told the BBC. Awarded “jobs for life,” most professional commentators — whether opining in newspaper columns like this one or blathering on television — suffer no consequence for making predictions that turn out “spectacularly wrong.” Klein’s (partly tongue-in-cheek) solution? Hold our pundits to account by making them reapply for their sinecures every four years, banishing those whose prognostications prove most wide of the mark. The socialist Klein’s embrace of market forces, however selective, is welcome. Might I offer the unfolding horror in Venezuela as the first litmus test

These are dangerous days for Stephen Bannon, President Trump’s brain. A new book about the White House chief strategist portrays the president as the empty vessel into which Mr. Bannon poured his ideology and agenda, propelling the two of them into the White House. The book, “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency,” by Joshua Green, a reporter who has known Mr. Bannon for years, is a best seller that gives Mr. Trump second billing. That’s made the empty vessel very angry.

When players get political, it turns out that fans can get political right back. After months of speculation and piles of anecdotal evidence, market-research company J. D. Power has weighed in with real data. After surveying 9,200 fans, researchers found that “national anthem protests were the top reason that NFL fans watched fewer games last season.” The protests were never popular. A September 2016 Reuters poll indicated that a super-majority of 72 percent of Americans believed the protests, led by Colin Kaepernick, were “unpatriotic,” but evidence that his protest had an impact on ratings was spotty, at best.

It’s heartening to see that President Trump’s weeklong, passive-aggressive assault on his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has crossed a line even for many of the president’s most stalwart supporters. Rush Limbaugh called Mr. Trump’s behavior “unseemly” on his radio show Monday. Of Mr. Sessions he said, “I hate to see him being treated this way.” Over in the Trump-friendly confines of Fox News, Tucker Carlson said the president’s humiliation of the attorney general was “a useless, self-destructive act,” and Mr. Carlson implored Mr. Trump: “For God’s sake, lay off Jeff Sessions. He’s your friend, one of the very few you

Let’s review a few recent developments. Last week, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, resigned. This was part of a “White House shakeup” to get the Trump administration back on track. The new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, would fix the White House’s “messaging problem.” Within 24 hours of Scaramucci’s appointment, the president returned to Twitter and unloaded another torrent of political bombshells, including talking about his power to pardon, even as his attorneys were denying that Donald Trump was thinking about pardoning anyone.

It costs as little as $10 and as much as $10,169 to get the same blood test in California. A lower-back M.R.I. priced at $199 at one Florida clinic goes for $6,221 in San Francisco. A shoulder X-ray can run anywhere between $21 and more than $700 across the United States. In Spain, a 30-day supply of Truvada, which helps prevent H.I.V.-AIDS, costs an average of $559, according to data compiled by the International Federation of Health Plans. In the United States it’s $1,301. In Britain, the average price of an angioplasty is $7,264 versus $31,620 in the United States.

Carrollton, Ga. — Jon Ossoff’s defeat in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District election on Tuesday wasn’t just a sign that Democrats may have a harder time winning in the Trump era than they had hoped. It is a symptom of a larger problem for the party — a generational and racial divide between a largely secular group of young, white party activists and an older electorate that is more religious and more socially conservative.

Even if the country were to descend into widespread unrest, it wouldn’t look like the unrest of 50 years ago. One month into 1968, the Vietnamese celebrated their new year and the Viet Cong launched its Tet Offensive. The chief of the South Vietnamese national police was photographed executing a captured Viet Cong officer, horrifying viewers across the world. Communist forces rapidly overran most of Hue, and hundreds of U.S. Marines were killed taking it back over the following month.

Marshawn Lynch, a runningback for the Oakland Raiders, sat and ate a banana during the national anthem on Saturday before the Raiders’ first preseason football game against the Arizona Cardinals in Glendale, Arizona. Lynch did not play during the game, and the Raiders’ coach said Lynch’s actions were a “non-issue.” Although Lynch said he has been doing this for 11 years, photos and videos show he stood on many occasions for the national anthem in recent years. Lynch reportedly was not present in the locker room after the game, according to CBS Sports. However, the Raiders’ coach, Jack Del Rio, said

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — White House officials, under siege over President Trump’s reluctance to condemn white supremacists for the weekend’s bloody rallies in Charlottesville, Va., tried to clarify his comments on Sunday, as critics in both parties intensified demands that he adopt a stronger, more unifying message. A statement on Sunday — issued more than 36 hours after the protests began — condemned “white supremacists” for the violence that led to one death. It came in an email sent to reporters in the president’s traveling press pool, and was attributed to an unnamed representative. It was not attributed directly to Mr.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), America’s largest Muslim civil rights group, is calling on state and local governments all over the United States to tear down all monuments and memorials commemorating Confederate leaders and the short-lived Confederate States of America. CAIR joined several groups asking for the removal of Confederate memorials in the wake of a “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally that turned violent over the weekend. (Snip) Nihad Awad, CAIR’s national executive director, urged state and local governments to erase every symbol and every vestige of Confederate history immediately. “A fitting response to the deadly terror attack

Former RNC chair Michael Steele says there is no other conclusion to be drawn: President Donald Trump is a racist. Speaking on the Steele & Ungar show — which airs on Sirius XM’s POTUS channel — the former RNC head blasted Trump’s response to Charlottesville. “This playing to the – it’s not even baser instincts. This is just raw, ugly, racism and hatred,” Steele said. “What, for votes? And so this is the Frankenstein monster that’s been created from a campaign that gave license to that.” Co-host Rick Ungar mentioned that a listener sent him an email asking if Steele thinks Trump

Mitt Romney fired back at President Trump for saying “both sides” were responsible for violence at a white supremacist rally over the weekend, claiming that the two clashing groups were more “morally different universes.” “No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes,” Romney tweeted Tuesday. (Tweet) Romney was responding to Trump’s comments Tuesday that “both sides” were to blame for the violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. on Saturday. Trump drew fire for saying Saturday that "many sides" were to blame for the violence at the

In Gainesville, Florida, workers hired by the Daughters of the Confederacy chipped away at a Confederate soldier´s statue, loaded it quietly on a truck and drove away with little fanfare. In Baltimore, Mayor Catherine Pugh said she´s ready to tear down all of her city´s Confederate statues, and the city council voted to have them destroyed. San Antonio lawmakers are looking ahead to removing a statue that many people wrongly assumed represented a famed Texas leader who died at the Alamo. Some people refused to wait. Protesters in Durham, North Carolina, used a rope to pull down the nearly century-old

If President Trump pardons former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, it “would be an official presidential endorsement of racism,” the American Civil Liberties Union said on Monday. Arpaio, now 85 years old, is famous for his tough stand on illegal immigration. He was convicted two weeks ago of criminal contempt for violating a court order instructing him to stop detaining people suspected of being in the country illegally. Fox News interviewed Trump on Sunday at his club in Bedminster, N.J. “I am seriously considering a pardon for Sheriff Arpaio,” Fox quoted the president as saying. “He has done a lot

Fox News viewers were livid after Dana Perino—long suspected to be someone, like Megyn Kelly, who cares more about the opinions of elites in New York and D.C. than Fox News’ viewers—smeared Breitbart News as a site for Nazis on Monday. It seems like the vapid Fox News host knows less about Breitbart News and the alt-right/new right than the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is saying quite a lot. Perino lashed out at President Donald Trump on The Five for allowing Nazis and the alt-right to seek “safe harbor under his wing” before adding that “the

In the Democrat radio address on Saturday, Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.), the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, declared that America “is not the land of the free and the home of the brave, where opportunity and prosperity are available to all.” Richmond said he and his fellow Democrats are “painfully aware” that America “has morphed into a country that has turned its back on too many of our families – our rural families, our blue collar families, our minority families, and especially those families working hard to escape poverty.” Richmond used his own life story to show how times

Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett said he plans to sit during the national anthem for the entire season after staying on the bench for the anthem during Seattle’s first preseason game against the Los Angeles Chargers on Sunday. Bennett said he was motivated by the events in Charlottesville and wanted to speak out on racial injustice. On Sunday, Bennett remained on the bench with a towel around his shoulder pads while the rest of his teammates stood for the anthem. “First of all I want to make sure people understand I love the military — my father was in the military,” Bennett told reporters. “I love hot dogs like any other

Hundreds of pro-Trump demonstrators and anti-Trump counter-protesters converged at Westlake Park in downtown Seattle on Sunday, resulting in several arrests and the confiscation of weapons. The rally, organized by the conservative group Patriot Prayer, came one day after violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left three people dead and dozens injured. Counter-protesters -- including antifa, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Veterans for Peace, Indivisible Seattle, Black Lives Matter, and the Freedom Socialist Party -- marched "in solidarity against hate," specifically against what they called “the bigotry, racism and violence" of the "far-right" organizers. Solidarity Against Hate counter-protesters waved communist flags,

A Chick-fil-A customer only realized she got more than she ordered after she bit into her chicken sandwich and found a dead rodent. Ellen Manfalouti, 46, took legal action last week against the fast food restaurant after she found a small rodent baked into her sandwich in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, according to Philly.com. The Holland resident is seeking $50,000 for the Nov. 25 incident. Manfalouti said that a co-worker brought the meal back to their workplace after picking it up from the Chick-fil-A drive-thru. While eating in a conference room, Manfalouti said that she noticed there was something off about the sandwich.